It’s not quite accurate to describe Natasha Kermani’s ingenious and distressing Lucky as a “time-loop slasher flick,” but if that hook lures some prospective viewers into streaming this startling, existentialist marvel, so much the better. Indie-horror mainstay Brea Grant portrays self-help author May, whose life is turned upside-down when a masked stranger breaks into her house and attempts to kill her, only to abruptly vanish. The real shocker, however? According to her husband (Dhruv Uday Singh), this attack occurs every night. What follows is a bit like a feminist-thriller riff on The Trial, as May is assaulted again and again by the same figure, only to be abandoned, blamed, and patronized by those around her. Kermani never advances a mundane explanation for this baffling, never-ending cycle of violence: Lucky is a surreal mind-screw right to the end. It’s less concerned with lucid metaphorical readings than with conjuring the absurd, exhausting sensation of living in the patriarchy’s violent shadow.

Rating: B

Now available to stream from Shudder.

Ivan Kavanagh’s occult-horror chiller Son packs lots of incident and gore into its 98 minutes, but not much originality. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the genre will quickly sort out what’s going on with David (Luke David Blumm), the tween son of single mom and cult refugee Laura (Halloween’s Andi Matichak). David is suddenly struck by a mysterious, debilitating illness that seems to be connected to the abusive sect that his mother escaped long ago. When a horrifying means of abating the boy’s ailment is revealed, Laura is obliged to take increasingly drastic actions to protect her only child. Son is a stylish feature with a sadistic flair for building tension in its set pieces to an appropriately demonic pitch. Unfortunately, the film suffers from a dearth of surprises, except for its final, silly twist. The feature is a solid implementation of a familiar premise, but it is too enamored with fruitlessly drawing out its mysteries and too disinterested in cultivating thematic depth.

Rating: C+

Now available to rent from major online platforms.

It’s difficult to envision another 2021 horror film squandering its early promise as thoroughly as Come True. Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) is a teenage runaway who joins a sleep study, partly to have a place to lay her head at night, but also to perhaps alleviate her disturbing nightmares. Unfortunately, the scientists running the experiment are not engaged in mundane medical research, but rather searching for a dark figure lurking in the universal subconscious. Giving a chilly, retro Cronenbergian sheen to a premise that crosses Stephen King with Until the End of the World (1991), writer-director Anthony Scott Burns gets big points for style, especially in his film’s mesmerizing nightmare sequences. (Which look more like goth-metal music videos than real dreams, but no matter.) Eventually, however, Burns starts to lose the thread, and disastrously so: romanticizing a creepy, age-inappropriate relationship; muddying the stakes when he should be clarifying them; and abruptly ending the film with a jaw-droppingly bad left-field twist.

Rating: C-

Now available to rent from major online platforms.

The raw ingredients are familiar: While traveling through a remote rural area, a young couple’s car breaks down, stranding them at an isolated farmhouse inhabited by menacing weirdos. Devereux Milburn’s Honeydew freely borrows elements from several notable influences – among them, Motel Hell, House of 1,000 Corpses, and Garth Ennis’ Preacher comics. However, his bizarre stylistic stamp gives the story a harrowing unpredictability even when it’s obvious that the destination involves murder, cannibalism, and freaky perversions of Middle American domesticity. It’s not quite The Greasy Strangler (2016) in terms of sheer grotesque weirdness, but it’s adjacent, and a hell of a lot scarier. The film’s look has a slightly retro quality, but it’s the score and sound design that truly unsettle, filling the feature’s spaces with creaks, plunks, and metallic scraping. The effect is repulsively unnerving: Although the protagonists are not particularly sympathetic, the film makes a dread promise that their fate will be far out of proportion to their crimes of being clueless and unpleasant.

Rating: B-

Now available to rent via virtual cinema from Dark Star Pictures.

For her first shift at an American Apparel-like chain store, Libby (Romane Denis) pulls an all-nighter, prepping for the release of the company’s new, butt-sculpting jeans. There’s just one problem: These demonic trousers are hungry! One would think that a horror-comedy about the highest of high concepts would lustily embrace its late-night schlockiness for easy laughs. However, Elza Kephart’s Slaxx is so focused on achieving future cult status, it winds up tripping over its own feet. Its satire of fast fashion, influencer culture, and workaday corporate malevolence is mostly toothless. Its moralizing about neo-imperialism and sweatshop labor feels hollow and ham-fisted. Other than bland Final Girl Libby, its characters are aggressively unpleasant caricatures. What’s left, then, is mostly the silly one-joke spectacle of sentient pants that dismember people and drink their blood, an absurdity pulled off with some goofily charming practical effects. This isn’t enough to compensate for the feature’s dire humor and repetitive plotting, however, and its 77 minutes end up feeling much, much longer.

Rating: C-

Now available to stream from Shudder.

Emma Tammi’s Blood Moon has little interest in concealing what sort of story it’s telling. No one ever utters the word “werewolf,” but it’s obvious what subgenre the film inhabits when single mom Esme (Megalyn Echikunwoke) locks young son Luna (Yonas Kibreab) in a custom-built cage once a month, always on the night of the full moon. Tammi frames this tale in terms of their close mother-child relationship and the day-to-day logistics of werewolfery, exploring the ways that Luna’s “condition” – inherited from his late father – complicates even the simplest tasks. The film is generally light on scares and gore until its final sequence, but it capably conveys a parent’s creeping dread about the moment when the world’s chaos breaches the barricades, when all their careful planning and hand-wringing amounts to naught. Ultimately, Blood Moon doesn’t do anything remotely stylish or surprising – every plot beat arrives right on schedule – but it’s a passable execution of werewolf-flick cliches.

Rating: C

Now available to stream from Hulu.

Given his impressive feature debut, The Dark (2018), it’s a bit disappointing to see writer-director Justin P. Lange retreat to a film as hackneyed as The Seventh Day, whose premise can be summed up as “Training Day meets The Exorcist.” Novice priest Father Daniel (Vadhir Derbez) is new to the demonic-possession beat, so when he is tasked with investigating a gruesome spree murder with satanic undertones, he is paired with hardened, tough-talking exorcism veteran Father Peter (Guy Pearce, slumming). Lange’s screenplay attempts to center the story on Daniel’s guilt and anxiety over a past run-in with the Devil’s servants. However, this just ends up feeling like a flimsy, cheapjack effort to paper over the stale hollowness of the film’s effects-driven religious horror. (Daniel eventually puzzles out that the accused juvenile killer tapped into demonic forces by playing with … a Ouija board.) It’s the worst kind of dully competent horror filmmaking – the kind that earnestly believes that it is doing something eerie, thrilling, and thoughtful.

Rating: C-

Now available to rent from major online platforms.

When the exhausted Cami (Jordan Hayes) slides into the back of a rideshare late one night, the viewer has already been primed to expect the worst from her creepy driver, Spencer (Max Topplin). Once Spencer’s car breaks down on a deserted, unfamiliar forest road, however, the real threat is gradually revealed as something much more otherworldly. After some trial-and-error problem-solving – and a visit from an eccentric local – Cami and Spencer discover that they have been ensnared in a pocket reality controlled by a malevolent entity, one that torments them with hallucinations to incite them to violence. Nader squeezes a lot of jangling terror from his marginal budget, slowly escalating the nightmare theatrics and successfully turning a stretch of nondescript road into a disorienting netherworld. (Less successful are the design elements that regrettably evoke a late-1990s nu-metal video.) Although undermined by its chintzy production values and an ending that feels like a cheap, cynical rug-pull, The Toll remains a chilling, unconventional little indie-horror outing.

Rating: C+

Now available to rent from major online platforms.